Professor Hsien-Chin Liou (劉顯親),

Three effective ways of teacher professional development: self-awareness, reflective teaching, and action research (suggested by Bailey, Curtis & Nunan, 2001) are supported by the literature. Professional knowledge and practical instructional skills are the content for professional development plus the maintenance of English proficiency for non-native teachers. As computer and Internet technologies are applied increasingly and widely across different educational contexts, their infusion into English classes becomes popular and a crucial component for teacher growth. In this talk, CALL cases (Computer Assisted Language Learning) are illustrated by five English teachers who have used web-based technologies in their college classes to enhance English teaching in Taiwan. The teachers have used the materials from a National Science & Technology Program for E-learning project on English teaching CANDLE (Corpus And NLP for Digital Learning of English, http://candle.fl.nthu.edu.tw, Liou, et al., 2006; Lin, et al., 2005). The ability to teach English with technology is different from the ability to use technology, because such a process should be based on sound pedagogy or sometimes a teacher’s personal theory about English teaching. Often, issues of teacher preparation or professional development as related to CALL use involves how such use interacts with teachers’ pedagogical approaches in specific contexts, regardless of whether the technology is advanced or not. English teachers of the CANDLE team, having some experience teaching with the project’s instructional units or environment, examine reflectively and critically the pedagogical processes in their individual college EFL contexts. Specifically, five cases of infusing the CANDLE Project into their college-level English teaching: Reading (two cases), Writing (one case), and Culture (two cases) are presented. Tsui’s Knowledge types (2003) or teachers’ maxims (Richards, 1998) applied in their respective CALL cases are also reported. Various future directions of using other technologies by English teachers will be suggested by the speaker with the interaction of language teachers/faculty at Department of Foreign Languages, Tsinghua University, Beijing.

 

 

Professor Hsien-Chin Liou (Ph. D. from University of Illinois) has been teaching at Department of Foreign languages and literature of National Tsing Hua University (Hsinchu, Taiwan) since 1989. She has conducted research on computer assisted language learning, EAP, English teacher education, etc., and published quite a few book chapters, journal articles (including Language Learning & Technology, CALICO Journal, Computer Assisted Language Learning, System, Asian Journal of English Language Teaching, English Teaching and Learning), conference articles, and books such as Multimedia English material development (1994), and Reflective practice and English teacher education (2000) (both by the Crane Publishing Company, Taipei, Taiwan). Her research achievements have been awarded by the National Science Council in Taiwan ten times. Currently, she is investigating the impact of virtual worlds for language learning, and Web. 2.0 technologies (blogs and wiki) for writing pedagogies. Online materials under a corpus approach plus NLP (natural language processing) from a National project of e-learning can be accessed in http://candle.fl.nthu.edu.tw. Her recent publications include other topics such as vocabulary learning, collocations, corpus/text analyses, EAP, and teacher education. She was the department Chair during 2001-2004, 2009-2010, and will keep serving from 2010 to 2013.

劉顯親目前為台灣新竹清華大學外國語文學系教授，曾擔任系主任(2001-2004, 2009-2010, and 2010-2013)及語言中心主任(2008-2009)，專長為電腦輔助語言學習、學術英文、師資培育、及英語教學之理論與實務。已發表國內外期刊及會議論文八十多篇，及專書<<多媒體英語教材研發>>、《英語教學，創意滿行囊》和<<省思與英語師資培育>>。並獲得十次台灣國科會研究獎勵。